Main topics to master in Photography (part two)

Main topics to master in Photography (part two)

Introduction

In the last post I talked about DOF. What is it and how can you make it bigger or smaller?

This article is about the so called Exposure Triangle.
There are three main controls on your camera that allow you to control the light and take the best possible image in any situation.

In this article I hope to explain you what it's all about and how you can use it to make better pictures.

The three key-controls on your camera

Photography is all about light. Literally photography means "writing with light". In your camera there are three controls to influence the way light is handled by your camera:

Shutter Speed (S)

Aperture (A)

Sensor sensitivity (ISO)

Shutter Speed

With the shutter speed dial you decide how long the sensor is exposed to the light that's coming in through the lens. The slower the shutter speed the longer the sensor is exposed. This has two possible consequences:

You can brighter images in dark places

You get more motion blur in your images

Both options can be useful for getting the image you want, but let's assume that you want a sharp image, you don't want the shutter speed to be too slow.

What to do?

Aperture

Well, you could increase the aperture of the lens. A larger aperture means there is more light allowed to pass through the lens to the sensor. In the same time that is... So a larger aperture allows you to use a faster shutter speed.

And this is the point I have to refer to my former article again. If you increase the aperture, the DoF get's smaller. So, the area in which objects are in focus becomes smaller.

So, once again: What to do?

ISO

In stead of increasing the aperture you could raise the ISO. Raising the ISO means the sensor gets more sensitive to light. In other words: less light will have more effect on the sensor.

And, yes, raising the ISO has a downside to. The higher the ISO the more noise will appear on the image. Why this happens is rather difficult to explain. Maybe I'll write an article on that in the future...

The story doesn't end here.
These three controls obviously interact with each other. I'll explain this in the next article soon.

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